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Day #101: Dead Witch Walking (Novel)

Rachel Morgan’s job has taken a turn for the worse, and she suspects her boss is making life harder for her on purpose. So when she’s presented with an opportunity to get away with leaving her job as a runner for Interland Security, she takes it.

Unfortunately for Rachel, her (now former-) boss decides he wants her dead, and puts a price on her head. And in a world where magic and monsters have revealed themselves to the human population, assassination can be a nasty game.

So, with the help of her new partners – the living vampire Ivy, and the pixy Jenks – Rachel must stay alive long enough to pay her half of the rent.

My take:

Dead Witch Walking is another one of those novels that appropriates horror-related themes for not-quite-horror-related purposes, falling more comfortably into the urban fantasy category; but, unlike The Midnight Hunt, it does start to veer more towards horror (lite) when it comes to its characterisation of demons, and the world they live in.

It’s also just an enjoyable read. In fact, whereas my recent habit has been to read the first book in a series and then move on to something else (all the better for blogging purposes, of course), I found myself immediately moving from this book to the next, then the next. And if I had the time, I’d probably have kept on going. Kim Harrison’s writing might not be as technically good as Mira Grant’s, but this slightly scuffed polish doesn’t take away from the fact that she can craft a damn good story, told from the perspective of an interestingly complex main character. And, while it’s true that the secondary characters in this series could use some more depth in order to flesh them out, that does appear to be happening over the span of later books; so, as long as you’re in it for the long run, The Hollows looks to me like it’ll be well worth the investment.